Not yet an instructional designer, my experience with projects of the caliber of those we read about from our weekly resources would have to be considered a mere puddle compared to the complexity that goes into major projects with large budgets and a staff. I will relate, though, the points of a project I undertook and which essentially took three summers to reach completion. As a school teacher, the summer months represented the only time available to pursue this individual goal. A key question concerns the concept of “scope creep” in project management. How does it apply in this scenario?
This term can be defined through many project management sources and it seems to be consistent. “Scope Creep” is an attempt by client or a project’s team of designers/developers “to improve the project’s output as the project progresses” (Portny et al, 2008, p 346). Such “tweaking” is an effort to make improvements beyond the specifications, but in the process adds time, energy, human resources and money to the effort. Another source explains it this way: “This inching forward of scope to introduce more requirements that are not included in the initial planning of the project whilst maintaining the same time frame for project delivery, is called Scope Creep” (2011).
As an English teacher, specifically of 11th graders, I had been tasked each year with providing instruction for one of education’s pillars of civilization – the dreaded term paper. Over the years I had accumulated and created a number of handouts and aids that explained the research process and provided examples and activities to help students understand what they were to do. Every year I’d spend hours at a copier duplicating and collating the pages which were ever growing and which eventually became a crude booklet on the research process.
When I transferred to a new school in the district, one interested in pursuing change and innovation, I decided to formalize my little booklet into something that could be useful school-wide and for all four years of high school and beyond. My project essentially was a one-man show with no budget, no timeline, and basically no client. The only pressures were those I imposed upon myself in the pursuit of producing atop-quality, single-source resource on the research process. Up to this point, most teachers would pull a handout here or an activity there to create their series of resources, but there was no collective resource for sharing materials and no unified effort at standardization across the department or even cross-curricular.
Now a key question has to be asked. Can a project catch “scope creep” when it’s such a small undertaking? While the disease can affect big projects with such interference that it can derail a mighty behemoth from its course, wouldn’t requests to change or improve a product or program under development be something good? Wouldn’t it be in the best interest of the product and producer to make revisions along the way? I can answer “Yes” for my little undertaking because there was no budget, no client, and no timeline. The risk factor would only be another summer to work on the “improvements”. For a larger venture,” scope creep” would be a considerable problem. If an idea for change were provided unilaterally, collateral deadlines would be affected and the project would more than likely run over budget. For my little “project,” there was no pressure of commitment for publishing and therefore to a client or to the public.
Such was exactly what happened as I standardized layout and pagination, font style and size, inserting visuals and creating more activities, and finalizing an instructional sequence for the content of my little booklet. I shared a draft of the booklet with a government teacher who suggested that if I included APA documentation models as well as the MLA format used for English papers that the document might be more universal for use by her department also (history, geography, government, economics, and psychology).
The suggestion was an excellent one and started me on another summer’s work as I added not only APA but also CBE for the natural and physical sciences. As I neared completion once again, I asked a number of professionals in and outside of the school and school district to offer their assessment and provide any suggestions for missing links in the logic or better explanations or instructional activities to add to the booklet. All the readers from librarians to AP English teachers and even college professors in the science department of a local university applauded the product and declared that it would help fulfill an important need.
So my project was waylaid by “scope creep,” but the result was a far better document, one that would be useful to students in doing research in any subject, not just English. With positive feedback, during that last summer I also sent out letters to local corporations seeking as many sponsors for funding as possible. My thinking was that neither the school nor the school division would want to “foot the bill” for printing 2000 copies – enough for each student at the school to have his own booklet.
Northrup-Grumman Shipbuilding gave us a check for $5000. The local newspaper offered to print the document once in “newsprint” as a supplement to a Sunday edition of the paper. The booklet would have reached thousands of homes but newsprint would not have been durable to provide the longevity needed for high school and college use. Ferguson Enterprises – largest distributor of bathroom fixtures in the world – offered to produce 350 copies of the booklet through their in-house print shop. They also suggested producing the booklet in CD format – far cheaper than paper and more “with-it” for 21st century education.
In 2001 the booklet was unveiled unceremoniously – a disappointment considering the corporate sponsorship. The booklet got little encouragement from the administration for its cross-curricular use. Each English teacher received a CD version of the booklet with suggestions to produce copies as needed. The 350 copies we’d received from Ferguson Enterprises were divided to create 15 class sets. Unfortunately, most teachers went about teaching the research process the same way they had done before. At least I had the satisfaction of knowing I had created a document appropriate for the times. Of course, now, everything about research and the documentation formats can be gotten online, but that’s a version I’ll let someone else tackle.
The topic of this blog concerns “scope creep” in project management. I raised the question as to whether it can actually be something good for a project. Certainly, if handled properly, such additional ideas might be managed without having to wait for version 12.10. It requires an acceptance and commitment to the idea that change can be helpful, positive and can be managed as suggested by Portny et al (2008). It requires the sense of vision and innovation to commit additional resources to accommodate such changes in “mid-stream.”
As for my scenario, I realize – as many of you may already have countered – that it isn’t really an example of a “project”. My task and goal didn’t truly meet the basic criteria of a project. It had no timeline and therefore no real project end (Portny et al, 2008, p5). The door was always open for change in terms of duration for completion and content, and it wasn’t constrained by the rigidity or formalism that I suspect often accompanies a real “project” needing careful management, not one-man control. I guess my project is the difference between something Garrison Keillor might do as opposed to Lee Iacocca.
References:
Laureate Education, Inc., (n.d.) Monitoring projects. [online Video]. [Dr. Harold Stolovitch, presenter]. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=6052000&Survey=1&47=7956863&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
Portny, S.E., Mantel, S.J., Meredith, J.R., Shafer, S.M. and Sutton, M.M. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Suresh, B. (2011). Project scope management. Retrieved from Project Perfect at http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_scope_creep_mgmt.php
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